Title: Shades of Doubt
Setting: Post-Empire Strikes Back
Characters: Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa
Summary: Luke reflects on Vader's revelation
Shades of Doubt
He watched them all, and it seemed almost like the wheeling of fighters in a battle, starships moving in elegant, deadly formation. Everyone had their role, their place. Their duty. A purpose, even. A conviction. A belief.
Everyone except Luke Skywalker.
He had those things, not so long ago. Not so long ago, his life had seemed much simpler. He was a rising star in the Rebellion. He was one of the best of the best when it came to piloting, and he knew it, and knew everyone else did too. Even Han said he was good. He came from a backwater planet no one had heard of, his ambivalent guardians had been brutally murdered, his father was a spice navigator and then a Jedi and a general.
He was the Rebellion's hero; the Jedi's hope; the Empire's bane.
He even loved a princess, who was not quite so brilliantly, impossibly magnificent as when they'd first met, but the more admirable and admired for it.
But everything had changed.
Vadercame to Bespin like a shadow in a cold night, unrelenting and inexorable. He'd taken Luke's friends, hurt them, used them, thrown them away. Luke had come to the Sith Lord's lure, and fought him in the domed chamber and the wind tunnel.
He'd fought a foe stronger than himself; a foe older, wiser and more powerful. He'd gone in headstrong and arrogant and angry – and afraid.
He was lucky he'd lost only a hand, he told himself at times. He could have lost so much more. Like his life, perhaps—
But it was a lie. He had lost more, hard though it was to admit. The rest of the universe couldn't see it, though sometimes Leia looked at him strangely, as though searching for a question she couldn't quite find. But he knew. He knew how everything had been shaken by that one statement, by those few words of Vader's, by the coldness and the truth.
I am your father, the Sith Lord had said. You know it to be true.
And everything had changed.
Luke's role as a Jedi was clouded. His place in the Rebellion was torn. Was it his legacy that led him, or a darker working of fate? His Jedi Masters had lied. What else did they hide? What secrets were concealed?
He wasn't a man accustomed to doubt, but he drowned in it now. Because somehow he was out of sync – he no longer moved in time with the rest of his friends, with the flow of the Rebellion. He felt distanced, off-kilter, ajar. The secret he held burned him, and the doubt seared. Could they find out?
The world that had seemed so light and clear before had acquired hues of darkness to his eyes. He could no longer see where he was walking; his path was obscured. How long could he harbour this secret before it flared its way out of him, fire-edged and destructive, with a life of its own? Surely something so huge and terrible couldn't be stifled forever…
In some ways it would almost be a relief to not have to bear its secret weight any longer. In other ways, ways where people he loved vilified him and hated him, the mere thought was enough to make him wake gasping in the shadowed hours of night.
He tried not to think of it, but it was never far from his mind. He turned it over in his thoughts, wondering, knowing he shouldn't but unable to stop—
—because those words had so much power for him, so much, and did Vader know, could he imagine, what they meant to Luke? Could he see the hunger that lay deep within?
Owen could have tried, came the spiteful, shameful thought that he couldn't quite suppress. He could have tried to pretend he had anything but disdain in his heart.
Luke quelled the tendril of bitterness; it wasn't unjust, entirely, no, but – superfluous. The man who could have been his father but never came close was gone, and… what?
His true father lived, a monster in a suit rather than a dead hero. A killer, a torturer, amoral and depraved… but did he love, once, to father a child? Had he touched in tenderness with the same hands that severed his son's wrist? He'd been a Jedi, a friend, a leader. How did he come from that to… Vader?
It was hard not to see a new humanity in the fearful machine-mask. It was hard not to wonder who his father was, who he'd been. How he felt about Luke. Hard not to wonder what lay beyond Vader… Hard not to heed that small, desperate flame that burned, whispering, I want to know him. I want to know my father.
Luke banished the thought, thrust it away savagely, again and again. But again and again, it came back, teasing at his thoughts. Wondering.
Join me, Luke, his father had said. Luke wondered what it would be like do to so. Not because he wanted to rule a galaxy, but because he wanted to know a father.
Wearily, Luke turned his thoughts back to the present, to the docking bay milling with Rebels, familiar faces now shaded with the hues of his secret, his fear. All moving with such purpose and assurance, like X-wings wheeling against a star-strewn sky…
Am I soaring, or am I plummeting?
"Luke?" Leia's voice startled him, her hand touching his arm lightly, fingers brushing his flightsuit like a whisper. Her eyes, as he turned, held worry, and some fear as well – Han's loss had shaken her deeply, he could tell. Something had happened between them while he'd been away, cloistered in the distant swamp with Yoda. Something that made her eyes shine with that odd, deep heaviness of sorrow, like a winter that could not end…
And she was concerned for him, fearful, as though she might lose him too. As though his doubt was pulling him away from her, not physically like Han, but just as tangibly.
She didn't need that. Leia was exceptionally strong, having had her heart shattered with a force that would destroy most more than once, and yet never bowing to pain or pressure, barely stopping to hurt. But Luke wouldn't cause her more heartache.
"I'm fine," he told her.
"Really?" Her fingers hovered; sometimes, she almost seemed able to read his thoughts. It was disconcerting, and now – sometimes upsetting, terrifying. But often reassuring, too, as though right, but in a way he could never explain.
"Really." Luke smiled and took her hand, squeezing gently. He said, "Let's go find Han."
After a moment, she smiled in return. The expression startled him, seeming for a moment like a reflection, somehow; an echo of his. "Let's," she agreed, and the flicker passed.
As they boarded the Millennium Falcon together, Leia's boots clicking on the ramp as she walked ahead of him, Luke thought, Maybe it's enough that I fly.
Leia looked back over her shoulder at him in that moment, showing him a warm smile. Luke smiled back, mirroring her without thought.
Maybe I can find what lies beneath the mask. Maybe there is a way…
And he knew: Yes.